The scene in Hair (1979) comes to mind, when the Treat Williams character, who took his friends place in the Army, is marching into the blackness of a transport plane's loading ramp, heading to Vietnam, to never return.

I believe the song he was singing was "Let the Sun Shine In"....
We starve-look at one another
Short of breath
Walking proudly in our winter coats
Wearing smells from laboratories
Facing a dying nation
Of moving paper fantasy
Listening for the new told lies
With supreme visions of lonely tunes

Braveheart: Murron has just been killed and William Wallace is riding slowly into the camp, pretending to turn himself in. He then caves in the face of the English soldier with a Flail-like weapon and the village revolts. The music and Gibson's facial expression help greatly here.

Forrest Gump: Jenny stands on the edge of the balcony and considers jumping as Free Bird blasts in the background.

flamtap wrote:
But the "intense" scene, for me, is the hand-to-hand fighting upstairs in that building. With the German prisoner. I still have to skip through it most of the time.

I agree. There's a weird parallel in mind when I watch The Two Towers. Aragorn prevents Theoden from killing Grima Wormtongue, who promptly rejoins the bad guys, and gives them crucial information about a structural weakness in Helm's Deep. The unfortunate lesson is both these cases is that if you take mercy on a bad guy, you've set yourself up cinematically for said bad guy to play a crucial roll in your downfall.

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered. -- GK Chesterton

In the movie It's a Wonderful Life when Jimmy Stewart (George Bailey) and Donna Reed (Mary) are at her Mother's house when they are talking on the phone to Mary's boyfriend and George's friend and they are holding the phone close to each other and then he grabs her and kisses her.

Also in the movie Officer and a Gentlemen when Lou Gossett is trying to break Richard Gere and he breaks down and starts crying "I've got No Place Else to Go"

For romantic intensity i would suggest the scene in Last Tango in Paris with Marlon Brando talking to his dead wife as she is laid out in the bedroom. Heart wrenching expression of grief over the loss of a love.

Full Metal Jacket is a good one. I'd especially nominate the bathroom scene at the end of the first half of the movie. When Leonard says, "I am....in a world....of s***," with that really creepy look. Yikes.

Sticking with the Vietnam theme, what about the Apocalypse Now scene where Captain Willard kills Colonel Kurtz while the natives simultaneously slaughter a cow, all to the tune of The Doors "The End?" When Martin Sheen's head comes out of the water, that gets me every time.

I thought of this thread while watching Fargo (for the umpteenth time) the other night and was sure I'd come up with another intense scene. Instead, there seemed to be a lack of intensity, or at least sustained intensity, at least for me. The closest I could come to it was when the guy who had just killed the trooper then chased down the driver who happened to witness the scene. My guess is the film's unusual and expert mix of genres - especially the comical - kept lessening the intensity.

ryuns wrote: Aragorn prevents Theoden from killing Grima Wormtongue, who promptly rejoins the bad guys, and gives them crucial information about a structural weakness in Helm's Deep. The unfortunate lesson is both these cases is that if you take mercy on a bad guy, you've set yourself up cinematically for said bad guy to play a crucial roll in your downfall.

Then again, Bilbo and Frodo sparing Gollum ended up saving Middle Earth because Gollum accidentally destroyed the ring in Mount Doom when it seemed that Frodo wouldn't be able to.